Marketing Strategy & Pro Tips

4 SEO Content Writing Tips That Even Picasso Would Follow

SEO writing has been considered a work of art for most businesses striving to gain page ranks in places such as Google Search. You don’t have to invest in paid advertising anymore to gain leverage in search engine rankings. Including these four simple SEO content writing tips within your next marketing strategy to increase your organic traffic, raise page rank, and convert readers into customers or clients:

1. Focus On your Audience, Not Just Your SEO

Although it is important to reach search engines, having a high ranking post or page does not guarantee that your target audience is going to find your content appealing. A big mistake that many copywriters make is focusing only on search engines and not on their audience. Without quality copy, you will not appeal to readers. Knowing your target audience is important in order to know what type of content and voice you will want to use to gain their attention and appeal. After you start gaining their attention, you need to understand your audience in order to convert them from a reader to a buyer.

2. Structure Your Content Correctly

Using subheadings allows your readers (and search engines) to quickly skim through the article and blog posts in order to understand what the content is going to talk about. This helps boost readability of your content for your readers to ensure that they are spending their time reading an article that gives the exact information that they are looking for.

Structure is more than subheadings though. Shorter paragraphs and lists are more appealing to readers, as it provides simple and more comprehensive content. Creating clear and organized information, rather than vague and trivial content, will win big for your audience and for your page ranking. Also, use bolding for phrases to highlight important info, but don’t go overboard or the emphasis will be lost and your content will become distracting.

3. Woo Your Search Engines Too

You can incorporate some of the strong SEO tips you learned within your content writing as long as it appeals to search engines, as well as, your target audience. On-page keyword usage is a simple way to make a post or page clear to read while improving your ranking in Google.

You can place keywords in your title, your first paragraph, in your subheadings, and even in your image alt tags. Try mixing up some useful keywords commonly used, and also incorporate long-tail keywords (three or four keyword phrases) into your content to gain more momentum in search engines.

Linking out, or sharing links from outside sources, is one of the many ways to take advantage of ranking through other people’s content (as long as it is relevant to yours). Linking in, which is directing your audience to another webpage on your own site, also helps your ranking. Setup some tests to see what produces the best results for your webpages.

Content should always be original and should not be copied & pasted from other websites (this can actually penalize your rankings), not to mention plagiarism. And remember not to clutter your copy with unnecessary keywords or fluff.

4. Writing with Style

As mentioned in the beginning, you want to focus on both search engine rankings and audience engagement through your content. Before writing your content, outline your ideas to make sure that there is a healthy balance between both sides.

When creating your copy, use an active voice and write like you are talking to the audience. Use techniques such as storytelling and rhetorical appeals to grab attention, and make sure that you content is clear for them to understand. Visual media, such as photos and video, are other ways of grabbing reader attention.

Above all, remember to include a call-to-action that will direct your audience down the buyer journey and closer towards purchasing your product or service.